


and you take me the way i am

by anothercover



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Denial of Feelings, F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-09-20 01:09:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9468728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: Real friends aren’t easy to come by. Jim knows that, and Leah McCoy is about the best friend he’s ever had. AU in which Bones has always been a woman. Because honestly: more girls. Always more girls.





	

**Author's Note:**

> if you have read this before, do not worry: i'm moving some old fic over from a veryvery old LJ because honestly, it's more than about that time!

Leah McCoy is about the only person on the shuttlecraft who looks as bad as Jim does. 

They make quite a pair, him in his bloodstained shirt and collection of bruises, her with the lingering scent of bourbon hovering around her like day-old perfume. Her hair’s flying in every which direction, and she’s got a touch of the crazy eyes, but all put together, it’s somehow working for her. Makes her look rough around the edges in an aesthetically appealing sort of way, the kind of woman who doesn’t seem so straitlaced as the rest of these cadets, the kind of woman he could probably talk into a couple go-rounds in the shuttle bathroom. A gorgeous, rumpled woman offering him a swig from her flask is about the only thing that could distract his attention from hot-ass Uhura.

But the first thing Leah does is rattle of a list of nasty ways to die in space - which, thanks, Jim hadn’t been concerned about Andorian shingles til a goddamn _doctor_ went and brought it up - and she’s threatening to throw up on him, so, yeah. He’s not all that interested in hitting on her, C-cups or no C-cups. An aviaphobic divorcee is more trouble than he’s ready to get into before they’ve even landed in San Francisco. He had a long night. 

Talking to her, though, that he can do. That, he’s happy to do, if for no other reason than it’s nice to not be the only misfit on the shuttle, and as a bonus, if he keeps her distracted, she probably won’t puke on him. 

By the time they land at the Academy, her flask is empty, he’s already started calling her ‘Bones’ and it’s like they’ve been best friends for years. 

They’re also the first new cadets to end up with demerits before they’re so much as measured for uniforms, on account of the fact that they’re both buzzed when they land. 

Jim likes to think this cements their bond.

* * *

It’s kind of strange, being friends with a woman, with no sexual charge underneath it. Jim doesn’t have that much experience in making friends, he guesses, female or otherwise.

But Bones is cranky and sarcastic, and she can trash talk him all day long, and underneath the gruffness, he knows that she likes him. Knows she respects him, and it’s more than mutual. By the end of the first year, she’s near the top of her classes in the medical program. She’s _the_ top in forensic, anatomical, and xeno-pathology, and every time someone tries to compliment her on the accomplishment, she downplays it with a gruff, “Already did med school, residency, and a got couple years of practice under my belt, it’d be embarrassing if I wasn’t at the top.” 

Bones understands him. 

She understands that it’s not so much Jim’s egotistical as it is that he’s just really good at being right a lot of the time. She still gives him shit for it, since it’s not his fault that sometimes it kind of comes out as ego, and he thinks maybe that’s what friendship’s actually supposed to be about. She understands him, but she’s not overly impressed with him. She grounds him, somehow. 

Real friends aren’t easy to come by. Jim knows that, and Leah McCoy is about the best friend he’s ever had. 

This is why Jim has never tried to sleep with her. His best friend is miles of leg, all bright eyes and dark hair she keeps in a messy knot at the back of her head. She has a better ‘don’t fuck with me’ face than even Uhura, and she can match him drink for drink when they hit the bar at the end of a long week. She doesn’t do makeup, and she wears pants uniforms because, in her words, “I’m too busy to shave my legs every goddamn day.” (And off Jim’s pointed look, had added, “Or week or whatever. Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a leg model.”)

And sure, there’s times when he looks at her and thinks about what an incredible idiot her ex-husband is, the ex-husband she never talks about. Jim doesn’t even know the guy’s name. 

Which is a good thing, really, because the one year anniversary of her divorce was the only time he’s ever seen Bones cry. Not big, wailing sobs or anything, Bones isn’t the type for that. Not even actual tears, really - it's weird, that he thinks of it as crying. He’d come home to find her sitting on his bed with her legs pulled up to her chest, looked like she _hurt_ , somewhere down deep and unreachable. He’d cancelled on Gaila to sit with Bones, keep an arm around her shoulder all night without saying a word. 

It was somehow worse than if she’d cried. 

So if he knew the guy’s name, he probably would have skipped his classes the next day and borrowed-with-intent-to-return-which-is-actually- _not_ -the-same-as-stealing-so-seriously-Captain-Pike-you-can-calm-down a shuttle to fly to Georgia and beat the shit out of him. 

But it’s not, like, for sexual reasons. It’s just part of what friendship is about. 

And even on the slim outside chance it _could_ about more than friendship, one day, off in the distance, it wouldn’t be worth fucking the friendship up, anyway.

* * *

Bones is in the shower, and Jim’s slumped on the floor of the bathroom reading his notes from Celestial Navigation. There’s going to be a pop quiz tomorrow - the instructor thinks he’s deeply unpredictable, but Jim can always tell when they’re coming. He failed the Kobayashi Maru for the second time last week, so right now, he wants to be the best at something. 

“Quiz me,” he yells over the pounding water. “Seriously, I know everything.”

Bones pokes her head out from behind the curtain. Her hair is piled on her head in wet curls, white suds swirled through the dark strands. “If you know everything, then why the hell should I quiz you?”

“Because I’m bored and you’re taking too long,” Jim tells her. “You’re always out of the shower in like ten minutes, what the hell is the holdup?”

She curls her upper lip at him, exasperated, and ducks back behind the shower curtain. “I’m shaving my legs.”

“You’re what?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“How long can it possibly take to shave your legs?”

“When you haven’t done it all month, _a while_ ,” she snarls, and he grins, because he loves it when Bones gets crabby. 

“Why are you breaking your streak?” he asks. 

“I’ve got a date tonight.”

“Right, good one,” Jim says, chuckling. “We’re going to the Roadhouse so I can pick a fight with O’Donnell. It’s gonna be awesome.”

“You can go to the Roadhouse and pick a fight with whoever you want. I’m going on a date.”

Jim laughs again, but there’s no answering chuckle from behind the shower curtain. “Bones?” he says, confused. “Um, I don’t understand.”

“Do you need me to use smaller words?”

“Somebody asked you out?” This is not computing. This makes no sense at all. 

“Malcolm Cooper. Science officer. You know him.”

“Who’s Malcolm Cooper, I don’t know any - wait, _Cooper_?” Jim says, flabbergasted. “You’re going on a date with _Science_ Cooper?”

“Second date. This time, he’s buying me dinner before I put out.”

Jim can’t sit anymore. Obviously this position has made all the blood in his body rush out of his head and his brain isn’t processing oxygen fast enough to understand words, because that’s the only explanation for it. He stands up and yanks the shower curtain back, where Bones is bent forward, lathering up her right leg with _his_ shaving cream. 

“You’re shaving your legs for _Cooper_?” he demands. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I have no idea. You’re obviously reacting so well,” she says, reaching out with her other hand and yanking the curtain closed again. Casual as you please, not even giving a shit that he just got an up close look at the goods. Like he’s her _brother_ or something. 

Which, that’s basically what they are. Brothers. Brothers where one of them is a girl, but brothers, so there’s really no problem here, except for that she’s going out with _Cooper_ who’s the biggest waste-of-space choad he’s ever met in his whole entire life except for a couple of other people. 

Bones turns off the shower and gropes for a towel on the rack for a minute before she emerges, wrapping it around herself. Jim’s eyes are drawn to her legs, which are long and smooth and wet, woman’s legs, and for a minute, he’s too busy staring to realize she’s glaring at him. 

“You fuck around with half the cadets in the academy. What the hell is so wrong with me going on a date?” she snaps. “This is such typical bullshit, it’s okay for you but it’s not okay for me - ”

Jim holds up his hands, trying to ward off the lecture. “Fuck around with whoever you want,” he says defensively. “I’m not judging. I think it’s great you’re dating again. I’m just surprised, okay? I’m not gonna pee in a circle around you or anything. I’m just thinking about it. I’m not actually gonna do it.”

Her lips twitch like she’s thinking about smiling for a minute. “Good. That’d annoy me,” she says, and swishes out of the bathroom leaving a cloud of perfumed moisture and a baffled Jim Kirk behind her.

* * *

Jim ends up picking a fight with Monroe at the bar instead, because Monroe is way bigger than O’Donnell.

By the time Jim ends up back in his dorm with a wad of tissue shoved up his bloody nostrils, he’s worked himself up into a righteously indignant, somewhat drunken state of being super, super pissed. For one thing, he’s pissed that Bones is keeping shit from him in general, because he tells her _everything_ , so that’s a gross miscarriage of justice right there, that's what that is.

For another thing, he’s pissed that she’s acting like he’s some caveman who thinks it’s not okay for girls to fuck around. It’s totally okay for girls to fuck around! It’s _awesome_ if girls fuck around! Jim is a big fan of girls fucking around! He was merely expressing surprise that Bones, his friend who spends all her time studying or hanging out with him, is showing a new interest in fucking around, when she has previously not expressed this kind of interest before. 

That is not the same as being a sexist dick, and for that, really, she owes him an enormous apology. He might be willing to forgive her, but he might _not_ , and how will she like that, huh? Probably not much, so there.

For a third thing, he doesn’t care even a little who she’s having sex with, so in your face, Leah McCoy with your stupid long smooth legs, and for a fourth thing, he doesn’t even _want_ to have sex with her out of respect for their friendship, and for a fifth thing, he’s going to go to her room and tell her all that right now and she will see that it is game, set, match to James T. Kirk and he wins and she loses, the end. 

It’s going to take him a little time to stagger across campus, so he brings the rest of the bottle of Saurian brandy to keep himself company. Halfway there, the terrible thought occurs to him that Bones might be at Cooper’s place instead of her dorm, but if that’s the case, no problem. He is one hundred percent totally okay with camping out in front of her door, what do you think of that, Leah? Jim Kirk can rough it with the best of them. 

Anyway, she can’t possibly be having that much fun spending the night at Cooper’s place. Like, for one thing, how many pillows does that guy even have? Because Jim happens to know that Bones is picky about her pillows. She doesn’t like them too puffy and she doesn’t like them too flat, and last year he bought her a special memory-foam one that she claims she can’t sleep without, and there’s no way she brought the special pillow Jim bought for her out on her stupid date. 

Or maybe he won’t camp outside the door. Like a door is supposed to be some kind of challenge? Like he can’t break in through a door. Please. Doors are for amateurs. Who does she think she is, making him camp out in _front_ of her door? He’ll show her. He will break in that door and sleep on her damn couch, so that’s another point to him right there.

These are all very grand plans, and he’s excited to put them into motion. 

When he bangs on the door of Bones’s room, though, the second she opens it - looking sleepy and squinty and pissed off, her hair’s a mess but she’s wearing sweatpants and a too-big Starfleet Xenolinguistics Club shirt that he's pretty sure belongs to him - he’s so relieved that all he can manage to do is burp.

And then pass out at her feet.

* * *

When he wakes up, his teeth feel like they’ve grown fur and his face is a little numb, but somehow he doesn’t have a hangover. There’s a bunch of IVs running into his arm, and when he blinks, he realizes it’s morning and he’s in Bones’s bed.

“Whuh - ” is all he manages before she punches him on the shoulder. Hard. Where he’s already bruised from the thing with O’Donnell. Monroe? O’Donnell. No, Monroe. “ _Hey_!”

“You,” she hisses, “do not deserve that banana bag.” Jim glances down at his arm, noticing that the needles are, in fact, hooked up to a bright yellow bag of fluid.

“You just keep these things laying around your place?” he asks, interested. “Is that why you’re never hungover?” Bones glares at him, then reaches out and wiggles one of the IVs. It feels like his whole fucking arm is on fire. “OW OW OW!”

“You also,” she continues, like he hasn’t even spoken, “didn’t deserve me hauling your fat ass into my bed, setting your nose, not to mention cleaning up and bandaging the crusty cuts all over your swollen giant ugly face.”

“My face is not ugly. My face is adorable,” Jim says with as much dignity as he can muster. “Um, did I crash your date?”

That gets him another wiggle of the IV as she unhooks him from it none too gently, and the only reason he doesn’t shriek this time is because he sees it coming. “I spent a half an hour shaving my legs and he didn’t even try to feel me up. So no, Jim, you didn’t crash my date, but since I’m not a goddamn idiot, I did actually realize that’s what you were hoping to do when you passed out in my hallway at one o’clock in the morning after that incredibly eloquent belch. _And I still set you up with a banana bag_.” 

“If I didn’t actually crash your date, I don’t see why you’re so mad,” Jim says optimistically. “I mean, I think this worked out very nicely for everyone.”

For a minute, he thinks that she’s actually going to punch him, and he winces instinctively, because his nose still does kind of hurt. 

“He’s the first guy who asked me out since my dipshit husband,” is all she says. “I wasn’t gonna stop being your best friend just because I went on a date, jackass.”

“But see, that’s how it starts. All of a sudden you don’t want to just get drunk and play pool anymore, you want to, like, spend all your time with him at the stupid Centaurian opera and some shit, and then it ends up with you and me assigned to different ships, and then you decide to leave altogether because you guys want to have kids - ”

“I don’t even like kids,” she interrupts, but Jim’s on a roll now.

“Then there’s all these little Boneses running around back here while I’m off on five year missions, and we stop talking, and you’re my best friend. You’re my _only_ friend. I don’t want it to go down that way. And you know what, I don’t even like the opera, so I can’t take you to - ”

“You’ve known me two years and you think my idea of a really kick-ass date is the opera?” Bones demands. “Are you even paying any fucking attention?”

“But if I did take you to the opera, I guarangoddamntee you, _I_ would have felt you up a little, especially if you shaved your legs. _And_ it’s different, because I don’t _date_ , I just, you know -- ”

“Screw around.”

“Yes!” Jim says, sitting up in bed and jabbing a finger at her. “That’s different. I’m not ever going to leave you for anybody I just screw around with. We’re _friends_ , which is why - we don’t screw around with each other because this _matter_ , okay? And I wouldn’t have even had to think about this stuff if you hadn’t gone and flashed your stupid, smooth legs at me, so when you think about this, it’s entirely your fault.” 

Bones stares at him in dead silence. For long enough that Jim starts realizing how epically stupid he just sounded. 

“That was the most emotionally constipated way of telling a woman you love her that I’ve ever heard in my entire life,” she finally says. 

“I’m special,” Jim says sulkily. 

“You’re an idiot.” Then she’s pulling her shirt over her head, tossing it aside before Jim can so much as blink. “I can't believe I’m about to contract the world’s first case of sexually transmitted idiocy.”

“Buh?” is all Jim can manage as she wriggles out of her sweatpants, then swings a leg over his side, lowering herself down onto his lap. Bones is naked. Bones is very, very naked, and this happened very, very quickly, and now she’s shifting her hips to align at a…really great angle that his cock seems to be paying attention to, even if the rest of him is still trying to catch up. “What about - the thing where I said you matter too much for me to have sex with you?”

“And then you said you want to date me. If you’re gonna date me, you’re gonna fuck me. So I figure before we jump into the dating part, we ought to see if the sex part works so we know if this is a colossal waste of time,” she says with a shrug. “You know, figure out if these feelings actually have some chemistry to back ‘em up or if it’s just a bunch of misplaced anxiety.”

“That’s extremely Vulcan of you,” Jim says. Amazing that he can still talk when his brain is leaking out of his ears. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Well, I did shave my legs. I get super pissed when that goes to waste,” she says. She catches his wrist, leads his hands up to rest on her breast and okay, yeah, Bones does have a really, really great rack. He’s always suspected as much. “But. I. And you. We’re - aw, hell, Jim. I’m as emotionally constipated as you are.”

“We’re about to have sex,” he says. When she doesn’t deny it, it sinks in that this is something that is actually going to happen. “We’re about to have _sex_ , so maybe you could stop saying the word ‘constipation’ so much?”

She grins, one eyebrow up, and suddenly everything about this is familiar even if nothing is. “Yeah, sure. What should I say instead?”

“‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen one that big’?” Jim suggests as she works his pants off, while he’s busy making a pretty thorough exploration of her breasts. 

Bones wraps one hand around his cock, squeezes. “Of course I’ve seen one that big, I’m a doctor.” 

“You’re killin’ my wood here, Bones.”

“No, I’m not.”

“No, you’re not,” he agrees as she does something twisty and amazing with her thumb and wrist. Then he’s pulling her down to kiss her, _really_ kiss her, and there’s nothing weird about it except for how it shuts the both of them up for awhile.

Which is not an easy feat.

* * *

Afterwards, they’re laying in her bed spooning. Jim’s half disgusted with himself, because he is not a spooner, and half delirious with happiness.

“Bones?” he mumbles, burying his face in her hair, and she makes a little happy murmur. “I think the dating part’s probably going to go pretty well.” 

“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe we should check it one more time, just to be sure.”


End file.
